Archive for the 'Linux' Category

Back to Ubuntu

Published
by
Dilantha
on November 8, 2009
in How To, Linux, Technology and Tools
. 0 Comments

I’m moving to Ubuntu (9.10 Karmic Koala) on my home pc. Its a big honking DELL Studio 1555 compared to my work MacBook 13. But hey it sits at home most of the time and grinds away at anything you give it.

It came with Vista. Hmm ya that wasn’t going to last. Within a few weeks of purchase DELL announced they would give a free upgrade to Windows 7. Ya I missed that. Within about a 1 1/2 months after buying it Vista got stuck and didn’t boot. I booted with a Ubuntu 9.04 cd got my files out and tested if it was worth moving to Ubuntu then. At the time the web cam didn’t work and I really couldn’t spend a lot of time hacking it back into existence. I did a DELL factory restore back to Vista and just waited.

Windows 7 came out. The upgrade was too expensive for a Vista user. If it was 50AUD or so I wouldn’t have minded. But 160-180AUD just for a upgrade was out. In the early stages there were not enough info about doing a clean install from an upgrade cd as well.

I didn’t want to do a in-place Vista upgrade and bring all that crap along, so that was out at the time, so I waited.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala came out. Got it, put it on a flash drive, booted and loved it. The web cam works now. Only thing I noticed was that it didn’t power down when it was shut down.

So I waited a few more weeks, backed up everything and installed Ubuntu 9.10 dual-boot. I applied the latest updates and that fixed the previous shut-down issue.

So far so good, moved my Firefox profile over and installed a bunch of apps I needed.

KeePass – password manager

sudo aptitude install keepassx

FileZilla – FTP client

sudo aptitude install filezilla

F-Spot is okay but I had some meta data on my photos with Picasa so I’m going to use that.

Skype sees my web cam it should work fine.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron)

Published
by
Dilantha
on April 24, 2008
in Linux
. 3 Comments

Get it while its hot. Its so hot I can hardly load the page. This is what torrents were made for.

http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.04/

Digg – Ubuntu Hardy Heron Released!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Sinhalen FOSS

Published
by
Dilantha
on April 10, 2008
in Linux and Open Source
. 0 Comments

Listening to Sinhalen FOSS. Sounds good! This is probably the first Sinhala podcast!

Some people couldn’t read the Sinhala text. Get the fonts at www.fonts.lk. Kottu will also start to look better.

Popularity: unranked [?]

A better ssh-copy-id | smithii.com

Published
by
Dilantha
on April 2, 2008
in How To, Linux and Open Source
. 0 Comments

I wanted to authorize my web host with my Cygwin shell to do some backups. I’m used to ssh-copy-id but Cygwin doesn’t have it. I found this script that does the trick.

A better ssh-copy-id | smithii.com

I put this code in a ssh-copy-id.sh file.

#!/bin/sh
# $Id$

SSH="${HOME}/.ssh"

if [ ! -f "${SSH}/identity.pub" ]
then
PASSPHRASE=
read -p "Enter ssh passphrase for ${HOSTNAME}:" PASSPHRASE
ssh-keygen -t rsa1 -N "$PASSPHRASE" -f "${SSH}/identity"
ssh-keygen -t rsa -N "$PASSPHRASE" -f "${SSH}/id_rsa"
ssh-keygen -t dsa -N "$PASSPHRASE" -f "${SSH}/id_dsa"
chmod -f go-w "${SSH}" "${SSH}/authorized_keys*"
fi

cd "${SSH}" && \
tar -c id*.pub | \
ssh $* 'tar -x
SSH="${HOME}/.ssh"
if [ ! -f "${SSH}/identity.pub" ]
then
PASSPHRASE=
read -p "Enter ssh passphrase for ${HOSTNAME}:" PASSPHRASE
ssh-keygen -t rsa1 -N "$PASSPHRASE" -f "${SSH}/identity"
ssh-keygen -t rsa -N "$PASSPHRASE" -f "${SSH}/id_rsa"
ssh-keygen -t dsa -N "$PASSPHRASE" -f "${SSH}/id_dsa"
fi
cat identity.pub >>"${SSH}/authorized_keys"
cat id_dsa.pub id_rsa.pub >>"${SSH}/authorized_keys2"
chmod -f go-w "${SSH}" "${SSH}/authorized_keys*"
rm -f identity.pub id_dsa.pub id_rsa.pub
'

Popularity: unranked [?]

SQLite Vacuum on F-Spot

Published
by
Dilantha
on March 26, 2008
in How To, Linux, Open Source and Tools
. 0 Comments

I heard on FLOSS Weekly 26: SQLite the other day about the vacuum command in SQLite and how it rebuilds the database and makes Apple Mail faster.

I started F-Spot to check some old photos and it was getting stuck. Hmm wait F-Spot uses a SQLite database too, so I tried something like this.

Went to the F-Spot directory.

cd /home/dilantha/.gnome2/f-spot

Backed up the current SQLite database.

cp photos.db photos.db.20080326

Opened the database

sqlite3 photos.db

Then in SQLite I got some help, listed tables and ran vacuum on photos and photo_tags.


.help
.tables
vacuum photos;
vacuum photo_tags;
.quit

Now F-Spot is running smooth as ever.

Popularity: unranked [?]